Dan & Tyler 2 - Wintergreen (15 page)

Dan made a small, snuffling sound, distressed, pained, without opening his eyes, and Tyler quelled a surge of relief. Not yet. Too soon for it. Dan was alive, but it didn't mean that he was safe. None of them were, and that included Paula. Tyler wasn't feeling very merciful right then.

He kept his thoughts off his face when he replied, though. "And what would that be?"

 

"I want you to go over to the cabin and cuff yourself to the door handle," she said calmly.

Tyler spared the door a glance and saw the gleam of metal; two pairs of cuffs, each with an empty cuff dangling down, waiting for his wrists. Easy enough to get out of, with that much play between them, but unlocking them would slow him down.

"No. Talk to me now." She fired, the bullet striking the ground a bare inch from Dan's head, sending grit and earth flying. Dan jerked, his head lolling to the side, a small smear of blood from a stone chip bright on his cheek, and Tyler swallowed dryly.

"He can live without ears," Paula said, "but he won't look as cute. Would that bother you? It wouldn't matter to me, but maybe you're fussier about your boys?"

Tyler walked over to the porch, pivoting as he passed her so that he never showed Paula his back. There were two ways to do what she wanted, but he went with the more awkward method of fastening the cuffs so that he ended up with his back to the door, not his face. With the cuffs shielded by his body from Paula's gaze, he managed to fasten them loosely. He felt vulnerable, staked-out prey, but logic told him that if she'd wanted him dead, he'd be bleeding out next to Dan.

Logic didn't stop his skin crawling as he stared at her, tugging hard once to prove that he was securely held, his hands just visible at his sides. As soon as he'd done that, he put his hands behind him and began to work on getting free of the cuffs, hoping that she was far enough away not to notice the small shifts of his muscles. He'd have given a lot for a paperclip, but he'd settle for losing skin as he tried to use sweat as lube.

"Good boy," she said. Textbook technique: belittle even as you praise, underline who's in charge. Stupid of her to think it'd work on him, but he doubted that she'd even noticed that she was doing it. She might have left the department, but she'd taken her training with her. "Now we talk. First, before you get all heroic on me, let's get one thing clear. I have no reason to kill your little pet. He's seen my face, but it won't matter in the long run."

Liar
, Tyler thought. She was right, though; it didn't matter. He planned to kill her at the first opportunity, which would take care of the threat to Dan. She was rogue. Her supposed death was the only reason a kill order hadn't been issued on her. Three agents had died trying to capture her before she handed over a list of current operatives to the highest bidder, and who knew how many lives had been lost because undercover agents had been forced to abandon their posts, their missions incomplete.

"The same goes for you. If you perform well, I'll let you walk away, too. There's nothing to be gained from removing either of you -- unless you get creative, in which case, so will I. I'm not a fan of torture for fun, but if it becomes necessary I can do things to him that will make him beg you to put him out of his misery. And you know I will."

Yeah, he knew. Tyler thought not of what she could do to Dan, but what he'd been trained to do himself. He'd never had to reduce a human to a mewling, begging wreck, broken in mind and body, but he knew how. His line of work was mostly done at a distance with him unobtrusive, invisible, and he'd liked it that way. Dan, stubborn and resilient as he was, still wouldn't last long. God, did Tyler really want him to when it could only ever end one way?

He rolled his eyes, allowing himself to look vaguely bored. "Cut the theatrics. What do you want? Why are you even here? I never worked with you on a job; we have no history." "That was true until very recently, and you've only got yourself to blame for all of this." She pointed at him, an accusatory stab of her finger, her face tight with annoyance. "You got my partner killed."

"Huh? You were working with Sturgis?" Disgust filled him, not at the way the two of them had hooked up -- like calls to like, and they were both scum as far as he was concerned -- but at his own stupidity. He'd found Drew Sturgis and stopped looking. There had been no hint that Sturgis was working with a partner, but he still should have looked for one, damn it.

"He was working for me," Paula corrected him. "He preferred to think of us as a team, though, and it wasn't like I cared about his delusions."

"You were in on his deal with the targets?" God, this effort to free himself was hurting his wrists, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered but getting free before Dan came around and tried to do something heroic. Maybe for the second time; Tyler couldn't see any reason why Paula would have knocked Dan out unless her hand was forced. When they got out of this, he was going to instruct Dan on the error of annoying people with guns. At length.

Blood, sticky and warm, was welling up from abraded skin. Blood wasn't all that slippery.

 

"I came up with it," she said. "All those people… all so rich. It seemed like such a waste to just kill them, don't you agree?"

 

"You know I don't."

 

"Oh, yes, I forgot." She pulled a solemn face. "They were
evil
."

 

"Yeah," Tyler said without heat. Paula could push his buttons, but not like that. "By any definition, most of them were."

She shrugged. "Their money spends the same as anyone else's. And you can't really claim the moral high ground. I've seen your kill stats; you're a monster yourself to many people. How did you escape getting taken care of? Oh, wait; you were working for the good guys, and you were always Cole's favorite. That makes all the difference -- except to the corpses and their families."

"Spare me the philosophy and don't bother trying to convince me that what you did was justified. What do you want?" One hand was almost free. He relaxed his fingers and tried to make bones fold like a fan, with marginal success. Humanity just hadn't evolved that way. Pity.

"One more kill."

His rejection of that idea was automatic and sincere, but he combined it with a hard tug on a cuff and camouflaged it with an abortive lunge forward. It gave him a reason for his face to contort; he just hoped that from where she stood, pain looked like angry revulsion. "No!" Paula sighed. "Your target is as destined for hell as any of your official ones, if that helps. In fact, once he hits his stride, he'll make the official better off dead list, so all that you'd be doing is anticipating that."

"No."

 

Her expression hardened, and she pointed the gun at Dan's hand. "Want to cut his food up for him for the rest of his life because he's down to three fingers on this hand?"

"Why do you think I retired?" Tyler said, keeping his voice level and calm as his left hand finally slipped free. He curled his fingers around the metal of the cuff to stop it from falling back with a noisy clatter and hoped that he wasn't dripping blood onto the porch. He didn't dare look down to check. "My nerve's gone. I hold a rifle and my hands shake. If you've read my file, you know it's true. I'm no use to you."

"Then you're both dead, right here, right now, so I suggest you get over your crisis of confidence," she snapped. "For fuck's sake, you were one of the best! You don't wake up one day and find that you can't hit the side of a barn from thirty feet away. You can still shoot if you want to."

"Paula--" God, he hated saying her name, talking to her as if they were friends. "You've got to give me more to work with here."

 

She threw back her head and stared up at the sky. "Why are men so stupid?"

 

"We're not stupid, just not mind readers," Tyler said dryly. The second cuff just didn't want to slide over his hand. Fuck. "Who do you want dead? Start there."

 

Paula smiled at him. "Better attitude. Good. You really don't like him being threatened, do you? That makes things so much easier for me."

She walked over to join him on the porch, keeping well out of reach of a kick from him and standing where the slightest of movements from Dan would be visible, just as Tyler would have. Amateurs were impulsive; pros weren't. He started thinking about how he could use that predictability against her.

"You know what Drew did, I guess. He told the targets when to expect the hit, they paid him, and I stayed with them and made sure killing the agents and disposing of the bodies went smoothly. By which I mean I did it myself." She was still smiling. Tyler wished she'd stop. "We offered a complete service to our clients. Okay, maybe we didn't send them a 'congratulations on escaping death' card afterward."

Bitch. It made sense of one thing he'd never understood -- the similarities between how the agents had died and the method of their disposal. No bullets had been left in the bodies, but from the autopsies, it had been assumed that the same type of gun had been used in each case. "I bet you got a kick out of it, too."
Paula pursed her lips reprovingly. "I take a pride in my work, yes. If you think that's wrong of me, I know people who'd think what you do with your little boy over there is just as depraved."

Tyler didn't let himself get goaded into defending his relationship with Dan or pointing out Dan's age. She knew the latter and didn't care about the first.

"Unfortunately, one target… well, let's just say that the agent surprised me by being better than I'd expected and managed to complete her task and get clear. She didn't see me, but I caught up to her later, of course, just to make sure there were no loose ends."

"Sue Jennings," Tyler said, another puzzle piece slotting into place.

"Mm-hmm." Paula gave him an approving nod. "With her target dead, his successor in the uh, family business, wasn't pleased. Mr. Drake was eloquent about our inefficiency in allowing his uncle to die after taking money to keep him alive. Now that Drew's history, I'm the only one left to answer his accusations. A little unfair of him to complain since his uncle's death was a dream come true for him, but I suppose he had to put up a front of grieving."

"He wants the money back, and you want me to kill him to avoid repaying him?" Tyler guessed.

"What a bloodthirsty little accountant you'd make." She shook her head. "No, I don't want him killed. In lieu of the money -- which I can't reach just yet and which he isn't really interested in -he wants a rival to disappear. Gun-running is such a competitive industry."

"So what's the problem?" Tyler was honestly confused. "You kill the rival, take a bow, and exit stage left to spend the money all by yourself now that Sturgis is out of the picture. Why do you need me?"

Paula ran her tongue over her lips, the dry flicker of a snake's tongue, with nothing sexual about it. "It's a matter of timing. I need to be somewhere else on the day that his competitor is wide open for a hit. A prior engagement with another client in need of my help to stay alive. Another opportunity will come along, of course, but Drake wants this resolved right now. And besides," her eyes glittered coldly, "you owe me. Your investigation led to Drew's death and ruined a perfectly good deal. Without him feeding me data on targets and agent deployment dates, it's going to be almost impossible to continue with what we were doing."

"Tough," Tyler said. He sighed with a weary impatience that wasn't feigned. "Why the hell didn't you just solve this problem another way, Paula? All I wanted was to walk away from this shit, and you've dragged me back into it. Thanks for nothing."

Her face twisted in annoyance. "Are you trying to talk me into killing you both now?"

She could. Two bullets and she could end it for both of them. He supposed it would be no more than he deserved, but Dan -- oh God, Dan hadn't earned any of this.
With an indifferent shrug, he said, "I've been living on borrowed time for years, and at least this way he won't suffer."

"You're such a little ray of sunshine." She nodded her head, a sharp, decisive gesture. "Fine. I'll shoot you both and find someone else to kill Derry." Two steps back and then she turned and aimed her gun at Dan's head.

This time, his lunge forward was unthinking, instinctual, as he tried futilely to put himself between her gun and Dan. "No!"

 

"Sweet," she purred. "Or do I mean sickening?"

He'd had nightmares like this, where he'd been running uphill, legs like lead. He felt the same helpless frustration now. There was nothing he could do to save Dan if Paula decided to cut her losses and go with someone else to solve her problem. Nothing at all.

Grasping at anything to keep her from pulling the trigger on her gun twice and walking away, he said, "Wait -- Derry?
Liam
Derry?"

 

Paula's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "You know him?"

 

Tyler took a deep breath and stopped fighting to break free. "Him, I'll kill for free."

 

"I don't recall offering to pay you, but I'll bite. Why?"

"You don't remember?" Tyler shook his head, drawing on a reservoir of strength he hadn't needed to tap into for a long time. "No, it was after you left, I guess. He sold a shipment of weapons to a religious cult and a month later they were all dead, down to babies too young to walk. His name didn't make the news, of course, but you're right; he's on a lot of lists. He's just not anywhere near the top."

"So you'll do it? Just like that?" Skepticism soured her voice. "Hmm."

 

Tyler kept his voice level. "No. Not just like that. I've got conditions. Lots of them." She raised her eyebrows, and he continued. "I keep Dan with me."

 

"Not a chance."

"Send someone you trust along with us," Tyler said, improvising desperately. He needed her to step closer again. "That way, they can report to you as soon as the hit goes down. They can keep Dan cuffed, hell, keep him drugged, unconscious -- but he stays where I can see him."

She frowned and, yes, shifted position just enough to bring her in range now that he had one hand free. He felt a moment of surprise that she'd even consider something as foolish as his proposal -- foolish from her perspective, at least. Dan stirred, moaning softly, and her head whipped around.